Minnesota in the winter can be home to some of the coldest temperatures on the planet.
Brian McCollor, a Minneapolis skier says,”This is 16 degrees. I have a couple of layers on and I’m not cold at all. It’s beautiful out.”
For Super Bowl 52, they’ll be putting the “Bold North”, as they’re calling it, on full display. To help do so, they’re using the 200 foot long American Birkebeiner International Bridge.
“The Super Bowl Committee got together and said we want to really showcase what happens in the upper Midwest when it’s winter. We don’t stay inside when it’s cold out, we get outside. We ski, we bike, we run and that means we have snow, so they say what’re we going to do. We gotta put snow downtown, they say we hear you have this bridge you can ski over and we said, ‘Well we do’,” says Ben Popp, Director of American Brikebeiner Ski Foundation.
18 semi-truck loads, and a three hour haul from Wisconsin later, it’s now spanning 200 feet across Nicollet Mall, home of Super Bowl Live, and actually goes up and over 9th street.
“Low and behold now we have skiing and fat biking and everything you can imagine right in downtown Minneapolis,” says Popp
Clearly there will be no shortage of embracing the cold this week.
Popp says, “For the opportunity to get to showcase what we do in the “Bold North”, that some people in North Carolina or Arizona would say that’s crazy, we actually do it.”
